Novelist Finds Many of Her Characters at Home : Maine: She often draws on her husband’s mundane existence for her stories. The irony is that he cannot read.

Carolyn Chute spends her days creating worlds of make-believe characters, worlds of the imagination--worlds her husband cannot enter on his own.

Chute is a writer. Her husband cannot read.

In a novel, that might be the stuff of irony and shame. But in life, the Chutes say, it’s a closed chapter.

Though Michael Chute cannot read her books, his wife says he contributes to them in many ways--by serving as a model for some of her characters, by using his keen eye to offer details that bring them to life, by listening as she reads final drafts aloud (rule of thumb: if he falls asleep, it needs work).

“I think Michael and I both are sociology majors at heart,” she says. “We both love characters. I think our whole view of life is about as close as you can get. We both look at it the same--that it’s both very beautiful and very terrible.”

Carolyn says watching Michael inspired her description of Reuben Bean making “the most piglike ghastly noises” when he eats in her acclaimed first novel, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine.”

Her second novel, “Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts,” was built around his experiences working in a salvage yard, and the main character in the book she is writing now shares her husband’s compassion for the poor and the elderly.

It is after Michael gets her characters in his head, she says, that he will suggest adding details that make them more realistic.

“He’s sort of steered me in that he was my audience when I had no audience,” she says. “He adds another layer to it, another dimension.”

Though Michael graduated from high school, he cannot read or write, he says, because of “a wicked case of dyslexia and school trauma.”

“Crowe Bovey parks his new pickup at the locked salvage yard gate. He sits with the windows rolled up, his hand on the wheel. He watches a single crow circling over the wrecks and junks. The crow dips almost playfully as it passes over the salvage office. Now Crowe Bovey sees others on the woodline, a tree of crows waiting, noisy, jubilant, more than he can count.”

--”Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts.”

The Chutes live at the end of a dirt road in an unfinished home in the hills of southwestern Maine, near the New Hampshire border.

The floors are bare plywood. The walls are made of the shiny backside of insulation rolls; they haven’t been covered with sheetrock. The home has no hot-water heater, no furnace, no flush toilet. An outhouse is attached.

In many ways, the unfinished house symbolizes how Carolyn still is struggling despite the success of her novels about Maine’s working poor.

She used part of the money from her first book to buy the land and start building the home, and had planned to use the money from her second book to finish the house. But it was quickly eaten up by family medical bills and attorney fees from a custody fight involving her grandson.

Carolyn, 44, is well into the fourth year of work on her third novel, but her advance has run out. She recently received a $25,000 Guggenheim fellowship--enough, she says, to keep her going until she finishes the book.

“I have to have four years to write a book,” she says. “If I’m lucky, I’ll be finished by spring.”

She writes 12 hours a day for weeks at a time, without interruption. She unplugs her phone and puts up a plywood sign at the head of her driveway, warning everyone to keep out.

“I find fiction to be more like going into an altered state . . . sort of like a dream state,” she says. “What comes out is sort of like a chunky dream. . . . What you’re writing is not truth, but it’s your consciousness and experience. When you see it, you know it’s you.”

Her first two books have earned her a place in New England’s rich literary tradition that might equal Edith Wharton’s, says University of New Hampshire Prof. David Watters, a specialist in the region’s literature.

“I think that she, as with Wharton, looks at the darker underside of the psyche,” Watters says. “But unlike Wharton, I think Carolyn Chute has a broad love for the characters she writes about. . . .

“I think she wants us to understand that these are people who are struggling, but they are still proud.”

“Before we get to say grace, Rubie heaps a conical slimy pile on his plate, forks American chop suey into his mouth, makes the most piglike ghastly noises ever, elbows of macaroni twirlin’ at the tails of his mustache, droppin’ back in his plate. He stabs into the butter with his hunting knife. He sucks milk from his drinkin’ jar. He gags, snorts like he’s about to huck one across the table, but manages to swallow it, his eyes waterin’. He wipes his knife on his leg and belches. Dale’s soft fox-color eyes narrow in disgust. ‘You better wipe your whiskahs,’ he says.”

--”The Beans of Egypt, Maine.”

The arrival of Carolyn’s first novel in 1985 “was a real literary event,” Watters says. The book chronicles the gritty, sometimes seamy lives of a large family called the Beans, and of a girl, Earlene Pomerleau, who is taught as a child to hate them but grows up to marry one.

“It blew itself up onto the bestseller’s list,” Watters recalled. “She was hailed by some of the best writers in America as a fresh, new voice.”

The book sold more than 350,000 copies and was published in five foreign countries, says Carolyn’s agent, Jane Gelfman. But the second book didn’t sell as well.

Watters, who thinks the second novel was better, says both books work because they are drawn from the lives of Carolyn and Michael.

“The details in her books can become symbols because she gets the details right. And her husband helps with that,” Watters says. “This is not just some intellectual exercise for her. This is her lived life.”

Born to a working-class family in Cape Elizabeth, Me., Carolyn has been poor most of her adult life.

“It was after Ronald Reagan that I got poor. That was the worst poor,” she says. “That was a very painful time in my life and I keep coming back to that. . . . It really cut deep.”

She quit high school when she was 16, got married, had her daughter, Joannah, and divorced eight years later.

She met Michael, now 36, in a bar on New Year’s Eve, 1977, and they married that next spring. The next seven years were the roughest of their lives, with each working intermittent minimum-wage jobs; she worked for a time in a chicken factory, he tore apart old cars in a junkyard.

Carolyn became pregnant in 1981, but never went into true labor, apparently because the medicine she was taking for a heart condition impeded the birth process. A month overdue, the Chutes’ son, Reuben, was born dead in 1982.

“We were too poor to have a funeral,” she says, “so we buried the baby ourselves.”

Although she had started putting down the first scenes of the Beans book in 1970, she began writing full-time after her son’s death. The book carries the dedication: “In memory of real Reuben.” Her third book draws on her experience in giving birth to him.

And, as with her first two books, it also draws on Michael’s experiences.

Michael’s rough-hewn beard flows to his chest. His main job is mowing the grass in Parsonsfield’s graveyards. He also is a volunteer for the local Meals-On-Wheels program and regularly visits a lonely 85-year-old man.

Carolyn says the main character in her new book lives in a small, rural town and mows the grass in graveyards. Although he doesn’t deliver meals, the character looks after the community’s elderly.

“Michael and I both have been very much outsiders since our first day of school,” Carolyn says. “We’re both the kind of people who would end up in prison if we didn’t end up on the welfare lines. If it weren’t for my books, I would be on welfare.”